Kim Dotcom to revive Megaupload

The new Megaupload is also expected to use digital currency bitcoin.

A controversial and eccentric character, Kim Schmitz – aka Kim Dotcom – has launched several projects over the last few years, such as the anti-NSA instant messaging platform, MegaChat, and the Baboom music streaming service, which he ultimately abandoned before it launched.

Kim Dotcom has said the new site will reinstate all the old user accounts and logins from the original Megaupload and will give the 100 million old users premium access for the new site.

Mr Dotcom wrote that emails would be sent to former users when the service was ready for them to rejoin it.

He added: “To former Megaupload and current Mega employees”.

Copyright holders were angered by this, which ultimately led to Megaupload being taken down as, while Dotcom was situated in New Zealand, his servers were located in the U.S.

Dotcom denied charges of internet piracy and money laundering and has been fighting extradition to the United States. The tycoon and three other colleagues were arrested on January 20, 2012.

Megaupload 2.0 will also allow users to sync all their devices and Dotcom has ensured no legacy code from the original venture underpins it.

Megaupload was founded in 2005. The move will provide almost unlimited cloud access to millions of users worldwide and Dotcom assures that MegaUpload has the technology and infrastructure to follow through on what he has advertised. Megaupload has even reached the top 13 most frequently visited websites.

Kim Schmitz was a famous teenage internet entrepreneur and hacker in the ’90s that, among other things, legally changed his last name to Dotcom and created the popular file hosting website Megaupload. However, he then resigned from the company’s board of directors. He said in one tweet, “Mega NZ is dead!”. While Mega removed all speed limitations for downloads, the site cut users’ free storage space to 50GB and introduced bandwidth limits for both free and paying users.

This is not the first time Dotcom’s attempted a comeback.